I am very happy to incorporate there thirty of my customers favorite flowers:

Camellia

Water Lily

Clover

Poinsettia

Fuchsia

Crocus

Ranunculus

Bird Of Paradise

Tiger Lily

Clivia

Morning Glory

Foxgloves

Sweet Pea

Lupine

Cornflower

Marigold

Zinnia

Peony

Geranium

Chinese Hibiscus

Daisy

Gladiolus

Marshmallow Flower

Queen Elizabeth Rose

Wisteria

Aloe Vera

Rhododendron

Purple Magnoia

Protea

Gerbera Daisy

Here is a “little” description of my work 🙂

This book contains thirty unique flower drawings with their botanical names and the same drawings with their common names.

Use your imagination with the help of pencils, markers, or watercolors to bring these drawings to life. Make sure to either detach the page you are working on or place an extra clear page behind the drawing when using watercolors or markers. A bonus is waiting for you at the back of this book: half dozen designs suitable for handmade greeting cards. Also, this book has helpful tips on framing your art. Stepping away from worries of the day is easy with this book! Relax, enjoy, and create!

This coloring book is suitable for adults and kids. Whole family fun. Its unique designs have different levels of complexity. Today world becomes busier and busier every single day. Technology separates family members by distracting with emails and social media. It becomes difficult to fine peace with blinking screens of laptops, cellphones, and other electronic devices. This constant rush creates stress and makes people burnt out and brings them away from present moment, from joy and happiness.

Features:

• 30 beautiful, stress-relieving Flowers with their common names, designed to occupy your mind and unleash your creativity.

• 30 flowers with their scientific name. Same designs; but, more science for you to learn.

• Half dozen unique Greeting Cards designs.

• Different levels of detail, from easy drawn flowers to more intricate ones. Pick any picture from anywhere in the book; and, depending on your mood of the day, start your creative journey.

• Printed on large 8.5×11 high quality paper with plenty of space for you to be creative and work on the details. And if you use black ink, you can always add more details around each flower.

• As each drawing is printed with the reverse side blank, when you are done coloring, you can detach your unique artwork and frame it. This book has helpful tips on how to frame your beautiful art.

• These flowers are perfect for decorating with colored pencils, markers, gel pens, watercolors, or crayons.

• When you think about creative gift, feel free to share your passion for coloring and give your friend a gift of relaxation. Or, enjoy a good time of coloring session with family.

• Coloring alone is also beneficial. It is calming, stress revealing, and meditative.

Add the color to your life!

Many people now finding out that coloring is great activity for anyone who wants to rejuvenate their thought process, relax by releasing mind from overwhelming stress. And the rising popularity of adult coloring books certainly shows that the genius is in the secret of its simplicity. It is easy to dive into the world of creativity suitable for both, children and adults, anyone who is not afraid to try new things, new experiences, and eager to learn anything new. There are no rules or special instructions. You can’t be right or wrong. The only things that you will need are few coloring tools and your imagination.

Welcome to the kitchen of a new coloring book, Flowers Botanical Drawing, Volume II, creation. Here is a sneak peek of the drawing and coloring process.

The first book is, slowly but surely, becoming bestseller on Amazon. And I believe it is because the authors, Irina Sztukowski ( yours truly) and Masha Batkova, not only put all their love into it; but, as well tested each and every flower from the book themselves:

In the process of preparation for the coloring book that I am working on with the artist Maria Batkova , we check all the flowers that we draw Black & White first thoughtfully , then we color them passionately ; and even place them on a wall to see how it will look framed.

This book is about botanical flowers, we’ve researched antique botanical paintings in the library archive; then, we stylized the old masters approach into a modern, fresh look for a contemporary interior.

So, we are testing every piece of art that we create, coloring it with pencils, watercolors, and markers; and, even framing the pieces to see how they will look in the home interior decor.

Creating a book, even a black and white coloring one, is a tedious process. One has to learn a lot of interesting things along the way such publishing structure, various computer programs to bring the art into electronic form and to bring a book to life. As the book that I am working on with the artist Maria Batkova is about botanical flowers, we’ve researched antique botanical paintings in the library archive. We are testing every piece of art that we create, coloring it with pencils, watercolors, and markers; and, even framing the pieces to see how they will look in the home interior decor.

The blog post subject applies to a human body, in this case especially to a woman’s figure. Yet, any body is beautiful: the lines, the muscles, the curves that Nature gifted all of us independently of gender, race, etc.; are stunning.

From August through December of this year I had a great opportunity to be in a Figure Drawing Class with one of the best art professors in San Francisco Bay Area, Jane Fisher.

In this class we learned the terms and definitions of human body anatomy; particularly the bones.

The main reason that I’ve attended this class was a priceless chance to draw the live models from San Francisco Art Model agency.

“Study of the human figure has traditionally been considered the best way to learning how to draw, beginning in the late Renaissance and continuing to the present”

(Kimon Nicolaides, The Natural Way to Draw, ISBN 0395205484)

When our professor told us that she fell in love with human anatomy, especially bones, I was questioning it: how can you be in love with, let’s say, skull or rib cage, or coccyx (the “tale-bone”).. But after drawing quite a few sketches of skeletons and gestures of live models, I have to admit: The human body IS AMAZING. There is no straight line, all bones and muscles ARE meant to be in the right place for a right function! Unbelievable!

In this class (which is actually a first part of complete course of Figure Drawing) I’ve done probably more than 100 quick sketches of the fast (2, 5, or 10 min) movements; around 20 long studies of the body, many body parts drawings from anatomy books and old masters artworks. That was quite an experience. The class was intense, filled with condensed knowledge, lots of interesting slides, facts, and inspirations for a future research.

Here are just a few drawings of the models. Some of them are in charcoal some in ink, some of them on white paper, others on toned:

… and many more drawings are in the Nude gallery, which will be growing not only with classic studies, but also with somewhat abstract or romantic paintings.

In Every Piece Of My Art There Is A Piece Of My Heart And A Sparkle Of My Soul

Like this:

In the last several month I had an opportunity to draw many portraits with models and from the photograph.

Above is the portrait of my niece when she was just about 10. She is holding her beloved pet here, wrapping him in her arms like a cozy blanket.

All other portraits were from studio time. It was fun to draw live; it requires sense of measurement, value study, and understanding an anatomy of the face.

The last one below is the skull of the man above. Oh, no, the man was alive, thank God! I just had to imagine what skull he has by placing a tracing paper on a drawing above and tracing imaginary bones there:

In Every Piece Of My Art There Is A Piece Of My Heart And A Sparkle Of My Soul

I am making a very good progress on my complex Old Masters/ Dutch Style still life (my favorite thing to paint actually)..

This is a complete, so to speak, fragment. Complete, but a Fragment. I played with the virtual frame to show that even a fragment can be sufficient when speaking about composition. The only thing I would change if I set this still life as a separate thing; I’d place the knife towards the apples.. But because it is a fragment, it will point “out” of the painting ..

Meantime, the drawing in the class required some serious hand work.. I’ve put my hands and some other students hands

TO WORK

:0)

In Every Piece Of My Art There Is A Piece Of My Heart And A Sparkle Of My Soul

A little puppy Fred back in 2012. I made this drawing for my husband to have a good memories of our cute little puppy. The puppy is now 70 plus pounds and he got a brother, red fox lab, George. I have not had a chance to paint or draw both of them yet. But I do have lots of cute photo references. And with this drawing it is a good start.

The technique here is very interesting: the original surface is black and waxy. Then I took an X-acto Knife and applying scratch after scratch created this drawing. A thousand scratches later, the while puppy, grass, flowers, and a ball appeared on a black surface.

This drawing was a good practice for my hand.

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Almost every artist knows that drawing skills help to make paintings better.

I made myself a huge and valuable gift this Fall: I’ve enrolled in 6 hour Figure Drawing class . Each week for the next four months I will straighten my drawing skills, with live and not-so-life models, researching anatomy books, and old masters drawings.

I am excited!

By now we did some simple drawings in the class, fast sketches so to speak. We catch and sketch the movement of the model working with the lines.

In Every Piece Of My Art There Is A Piece Of My Heart And A Sparkle Of My Soul

If somebody told me twenty years ago that when I turn 40+ I will paint balls and cylinders again, oy, I’d laugh very hard. Yet here I am, taking a drawing class for my degree. And the best part that I enjoy it. When teacher said we’ll do simple still lives, one per 3 hour class, I couldn’t believe its possible. My academic experience from Russian art schools told me it is impossible as we mostly painted in pencil (graphite) with very fine applications. Here we were supposed to use charcoal, sanquine, and white crayons on a tinted and very fine paper. These materials helped to speed up the process. It was not too easy to block out of watercolor-mind and use dry techniques. But it was fun.

I thought I will share some of non-watercolor art that I’ve done in the class this semester while I am working on one pretty urgent commission painting (not yet to be disclosed).

And by the end of the week you can see my masterpiece with pastels. Gosh! I have not used pastels literally 20+ years! You will be the judge :0)

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Each Drawing is on 18″x24″, Tinted 80lb Pastel Paper with charcoal, sanquine, and white crayons.

In Every Piece Of My Art
There Is A Piece Of My Heart And A Sparkle Of My Soul

This is a commission painting that I completed in watercolor for my client's T-Shirt designs. The design itself is in ink only but the colorful watercolor one is available for all the clients who wants to put this adorable basset puppy on a print on a wall. The good part of the commissioned design for […]

A new exciting commission painting of a Cute Little Basset Puppy Dog on a walk. I am so pleased how it looks not only on canvas on a wall but as well on various merchandise: Live To Create!!! www.artirina.com

It is time to say Many Many Thanks to the Art Collectors from different parts of the World for purchasing my art. Above painting was purchased by Art Collector from Chambersburg, PA. The customer from Peoria, IL purchased the Red Slippers, Tin Man Heart, Cowardly Lion, Scarecrow Hat painting from Wizard Of Oz series: And […]